essons from the Japanese Shinkansens.We are asked to admire the Japanese Shinkansens, the engineering aspects of them, but we should also take note of the geographical lessons of the Shinkansens.

(This Shinkansen is often called the "Tokaido line". This is not correct. The "Tokaido" is the coastal strip between Kyoto and Tokyo, it is very important in Japanese tradition. The road along it and later the 3' 6" gauge railway along it got the name "Tokaido line" and it is still callled that. The Shinkansens are standard gauge and were built since the war and are not called "Tokaido")

The Shinkansens are unbranched. That means that a chain A, B, C, D, E, F is not only a trunk route between A and F, it is also a local route between and D and E, E and F, etc. It might seem that the Japanese had no difficult choices to make because all their major cities are in a rough line along the coast, but that’s not quite true. They had the same difficulty getting the route into city centre stations as there would be in any country and in places they couldn’t do it, so they took the Shinkansen through another station in that town, called it “Shin”(Japanese for “new”) and called such stations "Shin/that town’s name", eg “Shin-Osaka) and continued on the unbranched route. If we did that in this country, we might set up an HS2 station in Birmingham Heartlands, and call it “Shin-Birmingham”, allowing us to continue the route London –Manchester route unbranched and not have a branch terminus at Curzon St. “Birmingham –Heartlands” was once a serious project, but it was not developed. However there were good reasons for it; it did away with a dead-end.

In this country we cannot be quite so simple, we must have a route each side of the Pennines, but for most of its Glasgow-London length it will be a single route, right for long-thin countries like Britain and Japan, and wrong for round countries such as France and Germany.

Click here forthis time-distance graph for the West Japan Shinkansen.(The word "Tokaido" is used here, this is because this graph was abstracted by a Westerner from published timetables; in Japan "Tokaido" nowadays means the old slow speed 3ft 6 inches gauge railway)It is rather old now, but the key features remain. It is all double track, all overtaking is at stations. Notice that:-

At some stations, two trains are stopped at once; these stations have at least two platforms in the same direction, passengers walk across a platform to change between fast and slow trains.

At other stations, two trains are not at the same station at the same time, passengers must wait on the same platform to change between fast and slow trains.

At yet other stations, some trains wait to be overtaken by two trains.

Such irregularities are to be expected; Japanese towns are no more regularly spaced than British ones. But it works! Notice also that the trains are slightly irregularly spaced; this follows from the need to allow stops but not take away safe braking distances between pairs. Spacing averages one train every 5 minutes = 12 trains per hour.